tannk11001

It is indeed gender discrimination by definition.

But it's not clear how you distinguish between what's an appropriate correction to historical discrimination and what's overcompensation. If the bias were in favor of an over-represented group, it would be more clear -- but that's not what we're seeing. Women are grossly underrepresented in STEM faculty, and the only way to correct that is to hire a greater share of them and to use their gender as a positive discriminating factor in hiring.

I don't believe either of us are in a position to judge whether that should best manifest as a 2:1 ratio during resume reviews, a 1.1:1 ratio in finalized hires, or a 5:1 ratio in outreach, or some other arbitrary number during some other arbitrary phase.

If the important thing is to be pedantic, I guess you win?

But if we want to be pragmatic, we can acknowledge that many women, disproportionately, confront sexualization and objectification throughout their regular daily experiences and that this therefore suggests that sexualizing things unnecessarily effects them disproportionately as well. And since we're all very aware of this imbalance, it's completely reasonable to suggest that the behavior is sexist.

This is great! This is exactly what needs to be happening, and what needs to get more broadly publicized if we're to see a more representative ratio in STEM faculty.

It's a long road from here to there, but this is encouraging.

You can give jobs to a few more people, you can serve a few more customers, you can experiment with bigger ideas, you can have a bigger impact, and you can sell something bigger when it comes time to sell the whole thing.

But as you seem to already know, there's no reason that those need to be your priorities and pursuing them comes with added cost and risk. If you're confident that you can satisfy your personal goals without taking investment, there's no reason that you should.

> I suspect it will cause some degree of resentment in the rest of the company.

Why is that? While some people might be that petty, it's very possible that Gravity never hired those kinds of people in the first place.

> It also removes the incentive to improve for the lower tiers, since they have further to move up the ladder before they see an increase in pay.

Why is that? I don't think the idea here is to raise everybody's wage and then institute some kind of 30 year wage freeze. It's to establish a baseline living wage so that none of your employees need to be hustling for other opportunities just to pay their living expenses. They can focus on their work and their lives. Rewarding exceptional behavior is a small cost once that's out of that way, and I don't see why we shouldn't expect to see it here.

That doesn't sound like a quagmire, so much as a couple pages of typical regulatory detail.

You're assuming that the wage market is already efficient and that Gravity's employees aren't worth $70k or more.

We know that your first assumption is wrong, and I don't think any of us are in a position to know if your second assumption is wrong or not. It certainly doesn't seem unreasonable.

If profits are unexpectedly worse next year, the compensation structure is probably the least of their worries.

What they're really doing is investing in their brand as an employer, in the belief that loyal, eager employees make a sustainable company. For a company working a space like credit card processing, that's probably a better bet than a big ad campaign or R&D investment.

As an engineer that identifies as being self-taught, even while having done some formal CS education after I'd already started my career, this question strikes me as unclear.

As far as I've seen in my own code, and those of my coworkers, we use all kinds of data structures when they're appropriate to a requirement and its constraints.

Are you suggesting that some people stubbornly don't use data structures that they're familiar with, even when they're important to speed/performance? I can't say I really see that happen very often. It's usually either that the engineer didn't happen to know the optimal solution, or (as was mentioned elsewhere) the optimal solution wasn't necessarily worth pursuing.

If you've hit a salary cap at startups, and care that much about salary, it's time to leave startups.

Generally, startups leverage enthusiasm and equity opportunity in order to pay less for their talent. Meanwhile, big boring multinationals pay ridiculous salaries in order to fulfill all the dull but critical needs of themselves and their clients. And there's a whole continuum in between.

If you do like startups and want to stay around, start negotiating for the perks that won't hurt their burn rate so much: equity, time off, R&D opportunities, etc.

We're finally starting to see some exciting substitutes for C++ in general systems programming, and increasingly many embedded devices are able to support runtimes that are more tolerant of faults and inefficiencies.

So even with it's innovations, C++ will probably eventually fall out use over the course of your career. But spending a few years focusing on it will give you a tremendous amount of foundational knowledge and shouldn't hurt your ability of step into something else as it comes up.

If you want to do systems programming or other high performance work, it's probably your best bet, even while you keep an eye on some of the technologies that are competing for the same space.

I wouldn't use Storyboards for anything that isn't a largely cookie cutter app with 5-10 ViewController's. They just get increasingly less maintainable as your application becomes more complex.

Generally, I default to individual NIB's and create code-based views as needed. Building and wiring views with Interface Builder is fast, easy and documenting. When you want to implement a certain view in code instead, there's no friction -- you just do it.

It's very likely that neither the job nor the startup will have amounted to much in 10 years, but they'll each have contributed different experiences. So it's ultimately up to your friend and whether they've got more interest in earning a years or three of startup experience, or more interest in learning in a more structured way as a recent-grad hire at the employer.

On the downside risk -- there's no blacklist. They might not see another offer from the hiring company, and if it's a small industry or city, they might have some unexpected doors closed on them. On the other hand, it's also possible that the hiring manager will be very sympathetic to a recent grad that's run into a tough situation and might even encourage him to go on his way.

If the HN community is a reflection of anything in the real world, it's because people are sensitive to personal critiques and sometimes react by immediately assuming an intensely self-defensive posture, even if they reflect more thoughtfully on the critique later on.

Not everybody does that, and few people do that all the time, but it doesn't take all that many people for it to lead to some heated discussions and wild swings in up/down votes.

You're assuming a very extreme context and using it to throw out the real value that's being offered to you in this article.

It's completely reasonable for a person or group to describe behaviors that make them uncomfortable, and it's especially valuable for them to do so when those offenses aren't immediately obvious.

Listing these behaviors doesn't involve some fantasy that they'll all be eradicated tomorrow with subsequent violators ostracized and sent to prison. It's just sharing a real problem that's really experienced by someone.

In point fact, there's almost certainly debate to be had within a community about which items have broader import and which might just be personal issues to the individual who composed the list.

The value being offered to you is that you can read this and identify a few behaviors that do hurt some people, some times. And that -- as you're available and ready to exercise them -- you have a few specific changes you can make so that the people around you are more comfortable.

You're absolutely right. It's casual and doesn't carry an explicit gender connotation to most people that use it.

At the same time, bringing attention to the implicit sexism (a la 'mankind') is valid. It doesn't mean anybody has to shame themselves for saying 'guys', it just suggests that they might want to consider other word choices in delicate situations or when they've got the reserves to be a little more conscientious.

> who determines if said sexualization is needless?

The people being sexualized.

And maybe I just find myself in different circles than you, but I rarely see or hear blanket Puritanical statements like you describe. Instead, I see and here statements that are more like "These are things that make me uncomfortable. Please consider them seriously."

Rather than obsessing every waking moment, or shutting your eyes and ignoring the topic altogether -- both of which seem extreme -- you can perhaps find a balance:

Read the article, consider its merits, and do what you can when you can.

You don't think that needlessly sexualizing things might be insensitive to people who are themselves subject to exactly the same kind of needless sexualizing?

It's no less insensitive just because women are also capable of sexualizing things, or because men may also find it uncomfortable.

Programmatically generated art is still an immature medium, and rudimentary experiments in the medium still dominate what you see. They don't need to be great art for them to stimulate a little curiousity and interest among people are are following the medium more closely than you are, and that's what you see in galleries like those presented here.

You don't find them remarkable because they're the medium's equivalent of photography's early Daguerreotypes. Those early photos lack many truly artistic qualities. The substrates couldn't capture tonality, dynamic range or action very well. The artists were still surveying the very basic possibilities of photography. It wasn't until decades later that we start seeing great art coming from photography.

The same applies here. Most generative pieces using Context Free or Processing are unremarkable as 'art' because they're just basic surveys. They're still just using tempura paint and seeing what they can do with it.

But keep your mind open -- give it another 30 years, as the medium matures, and you're sure to be embarassed by how trivially you pass it off here. Year after year, more expressiveness will come through in more sophisticated generators made with more and more sophisticated tools.

Just talk to them. Standard Operating Procedure would be for them to file a 1099, which generally requires a W9 that provides your information.

The person asking for a W9 from you is probably not familiar with how this changes when working with workers outside the US. You can explain that you won't be able to complete a W9 because they're only for US citizens and residents and see where the conversation goes from there.

They still need to declare and classify their expense, so may need you to complete some other paperwork, but it doesn't really effect anything about your own tax obligations or filing requirements. Don't worry about it.

If you have a good relationship with them and trust them: tell them as soon as possible -- even before you start receiving offers.

They'll respect your needs but will want to work with you to make a smooth transition to your replacement. That's going to take a while and they'll benefit from as much assistance and lead time as you can give them. You can work with them to make sure you have some paying work with them until you find a new job even once a new candidate is found.

If you're not completely burnt out, they might even try to address your concerns and make things more comfortable for you so that you don't have to look for a new job at all.